Baltimore is, as most of us know, a small town masquerading as a big city — Smalltimore. And it’s about more than the likelihood that you’ll run into your 10th grade algebra tutor buying a donut at the RoFo.

It’s about scenes like the one I encountered this morning at the firehouse down the street from my house. With a few signs and a few voting booths, it was transformed into something like a modern Mayberry, with citizens of this big small town all united across cultures and generations to do the most quintessentially American thing — voting.

And it made me positively gushy. And I am typically judicious with my gushing.

Look, I’m a cynical, middle-aged columnist living in a city with some real problems everyone is upfront about amid a pandemic and a literal fight to maintain that aforementioned democracy. It’s real out here. But I was positively encouraged by the couple of minutes I spent today perusing my paper ballot and chatting with the friendly poll workers stationed behind folding tables parked near the shiny engines and the hook and ladder truck.

My little boy, obsessed with these gleaming vehicles of service, has been hoping to get a tour of the station. But today the firehouse was designated for more momentous purposes. These workers, mostly women who appeared to be between their enthusiastic mid-20s and their wise and fabulous mid-70s, could have been anywhere at 9:30 on a sunny and not-yet punishingly hot summer Tuesday morning. And in this day and age when poll workers nationwide are being intimidated, it’s a risky pastime.

Yet they were here in this firehouse with the bay doors open wide “so it’s COVID friendly,” one of the volunteers told me cheerily. They were there to assist their neighbors in having a voice on who runs their city and their state. There’s nothing more basic or beautiful than that — people pitching in to try to change things. It looked like progress, and also tradition.

It looked like America. Yeah, yeah, I know. That makes me sound like a big goober. Don’t care.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to some, but there is evidence that there are forces right now trying to make sure that certain voices will never count. That’s bleak and I hate it. But here are all these people, betting that their wills will be heeded. Sure, that sounds dramatic, but isn’t this a dramatic situation? As rights are being peeled back before our eyes, with lawmakers straight-up telling us they’re coming for others, we need this. It’s make or break.

I haven’t done any deep dives into the number of voters today — those facts and figures will come later — but the poll worker I chatted with told me that turnout at this particular site, was, at that time, “brisk,” much busier than when she voted early the previous week. Certainly, the stream of voters that came and went during the ten or so minutes it took me to vote and then wait for my mother to do the same was encouraging. People were taking what seemed like a considerable amount of time to weigh their choices. Everybody was smiling. It felt kind of groovy. It reminded me of when future Vice President Al Gore spoke on the lawn at the University of Maryland, where I was a senior, and people were selling tie-dye and playing 10,000 Maniacs songs on the grass. Heady. Like possibility.

Like America.

Again, I’m not naive enough to believe that the simple act of voting is a magic elixir for the ills of our society, of the people who hate other people, of this culture of guns and violence and the people who want you to forget that we are still in a pandemic. But it’s a thing we can do. It is a start. It’s why my parents participated in the March on Washington as high school students and took us with them to canvas for candidates as kids in Northwood. It’s why my dad used to call my sister and I when we were in college to remind us that there was an election in our town, and to ask when we were going to vote that day.

We feel so helpless right now. Times are scary. But there was a glimmer of … optimism? Purpose? Determination to do the only thing available? Maybe all of that.

But it felt right. I will take it. We can use all the glimmers of magic to make sure that the reality of this American experiment lives up to the brochure for everyone.

And it was a good way to spend a morning.

leslie.streeter@thebaltimorebanner.com

READ MORE:

• What to expect as Marylanders head to the polls today
• Who exactly are these people I am voting for?